Hello and welcome to our first Marketwire-Sysomos webinar entitled, Making Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Work for your Brand: Gaining Insight from Information. I’m Garry Przyklenk, Online Marketing Manager at Marketwire, and I’m joined today by Matt Farlie, Product Manager at Marketwire. Matt and I will be your hosts through the next hour as we discover challenges faced by communications professionals with respect to social media monitoring, data collection and analytics, and how you can get actionable insights through Marketwire Sysomos products.

In reviewing our agenda for today’s webinar, you’ll see that we’ll be covering the full lifecycle of social media engagement, monitoring and analysis.We’ll cover:-Challenges faced by communicators, advertisers, and marketers when monitoring social media and how they relate to Sysomos’ 5 W’s of Business Intelligence-Real-world applications of social media monitoring and analytics tools-An introduction to our social media dashboard application: Sysomos Heartbeat-And last but not least, our full-fledged media analysis platform: Sysomos MAPAt the end of the presentation, we will save about 5-10 minutes for questions from our audience. Just a quick note before we begin, all lines will be muted for the duration of this webinar, but if you have questions at any time during the presentation, feel free to enter your questions in the webinar interface. Due to the number of participants in today’s call, it may not be possible to review each and every question, but we’ll try to get to as many as possible.

Social media has dramatically changed the way we all communicate. In the same way email revolutionized the way we communicate within closed systems, social media platforms changed the way we communicate within larger-scale communities. But to succeed in this new arena, you really have to put down the proverbial bullhorn and start joining the conversation. Easier said than done…

You’ve probably seen this before, it’s Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism, version 3! This new version actually just came out a few weeks ago. The old version was smaller, had fewer colors, and fewer platforms. The quote-unquote “old” version is only two years old! That’s how quickly the social media landscape has changed.Obviously, this is just a portion of the prism and as you can see, there are literally hundreds of platforms that power thousands of sites spanning the internet. Each one of these platforms and sites offers communities different ways to engage in conversation. Communicators are faced with so many challenges when it comes to participating and engaging in these conversations, and they are continually asking the same questions: Where are interesting conversations happening? Who is participating in the most important conversations? What conversations should we avoid? What do I say? All of these questions can keep you from opportunities in social media engagement.

Joining the conversation is one challenge, despite how innocent it seems on the surface.The next major challenge communicators face is one I like to refer to as Reach versus Affinity. Affinity can be thought of as a trickle-down mechanism that enables a message to go from my followers to followers of my followers. If joining the conversation is a challenge of “where,” reach versus affinity is a challenge of “who”. There are millions of individuals actively engaging in billions of conversations, and there are untold throngs of individuals who may not be actively taking part, but who are lurking in anonymity. The key to finding “who” to engage depends on your organization’s goals, but it’s helpful to understand the differences between those individuals with great reach, and those with great affinity. Let’s explore the differences…

Reach can be defined as either the total direct relationships between individuals, or the total number of individuals influenced by a particular message. This is not always a straightforward concept due to the use or misuse of the word “reach” within different contexts. Some examples of what might be considered reach are metrics such as followers, fans or likes, subscribers, and impressions. Reach is the goal of traditional marketing, and you may have heard the term “spray and pray” or “bullhorn” which both allude to the notion that if you put out a message loudly enough, and wide enough, in hopes of reaching the most people possible, surely you’ll have success with your outreach. Over the past few years, communicators have learned to appreciate quality over quantity, and realized that a targeted approach to reaching the right audience is hugely important. Social media enhances that need for greater targeting.

If you think about how social media has transformed communications, it becomes obvious that reach still factors into success, but not as much as affinity. You can think of affinity as the likelihood that a message is passed on from one person to another in a chain reaction of sorts. Affinity links interested individuals, or communities, and relies on intimacy. Rarely is affinity achieved through the bullhorn because by definition, it’s passed between individuals with similar tastes. Social media is a strong facilitator of sharing personally engaging content because people readily congregate in “virtual” groups all the time. For example, Twitter users will “follow” people that they find interesting, individuals will join forums based on shared interests or goals, friends will find each other on Facebook and reminisce. Some examples of metrics you can use to gauge affinity include “Authority” and “Influence”.

Something special happens when reach and affinity meet.

When reach and affinity both occur at the same time, you have the potential for a message, or concept, or story to go viral. Think about the Old Spice guy. The commercials were far reaching and interesting enough, but Old Spice took their message online to influential bloggers with personalized videos that triggered affinity of their message. Reach + Affinity = Viral. It turns out that the Old Spice example wasn’t a huge success in terms of ROI, but it was a good example of how to bridge the gap between offline and online messaging, making it viral. It’s important to keep this in mind because if you craft a message or campaign that does well, you’ll want to be able to demonstrate that success, but on the same token, if something goes wrong you want to be able to manage any potential problems. Consider BP and how their reaction to the situation in the Gulf went horribly amiss.

Now that we’ve discussed reach and affinity, let’s examine what I like to call the ‘real-time’ challenge…

We have a number of different ways to measure our “Quantitative” success. Online competitive intelligence metrics measured and provided by companies such as Compete, comScore, and Hitwise are normally updated every 30 days or so, far from realtime. Broadcast metrics are faster, with Nielsen ratings available in a few days or so after something appears on television, still not really realtime. Web analytics is great, and certain companies do offer instantaneous reporting, however most solutions present data after 15 minutes or so of processing; closer to realtime, but still not really there.But social media occurs in realtime, so tools that can monitor and analyze in real time can be incredibly valuable to communicators – you’re able to see what’s happening, and who’s talking… RIGHT NOW. But there are challenges with that “right now” and we are only human. While some of us would like to stay connected 24/7, it’s just not possible. In just a minute, I’ll hand over the reigns to my colleague and co-host, Matt, who will show you just how Sysomos MAP and Heartbeat solve these problems.

The fourth challenge is one of sheer scale. There is a lot of data out there, so much so that in order to do anything meaningful with that data, you have to start manipulating it and analyzing patterns to find out what the key conversations are saying about your brand.

Data in a vacuum is useless. Tools are certainly part of the equation, and can help in digesting data to make it less overwhelming using visualizations to illustrate several dimensions including:-Overarching themes-Visitor segmentation-Data relationships or relatednessAnd much more. To the left you’ll see a buzz graph that I pulled from Sysomos Heartbeat that shows the relationship of common terms surrounding “social media”, and as expected, the top related terms include things like facebook, twitter, marketer, network, strategies, and business. For many of us, the terms surrounding our products and services, or even concepts in our industry may not be as obvious.

The final challenge of social media engagement is sentiment. Sentiment can be defined as the perception or emotional reaction towards a particular brand or product. Historically, sentiment was very difficult to analyze and evaluate using computer algorithms, but not anymore.

Here’s an example to illustrate. A few weeks ago, the GAP changed their logo from the classic navy blue version on the top of this slide to an outcry of public scrutiny. Social media has empowered consumers with the ability to voice their opinion and make decisions in real time. So it’s important for communicators to think about how real time changes communications. GAP’s logo change started an internet meme, whereby Twitter users replaced their avatars with logos of their name in the same style as the new GAP logo. Shortly after, the people at GAP reversed their decision and reverted back to the much-beloved older version of their logo, thereby quickly turning negative sentiment into positive sentiment.

Let’s look atanother real-world example that includes positive and neutral sentiment. Good old Conan O’brien. Turns out that chatter surrounding the debut of his new show is 57% positive, 42% neutral and 1% negative. Delving deeper into Sysomos MAP, I’m able to see some of the guests he has lined up for his debut week including Seth Rogan, Michael Cera, Soundgarden and Tom Hanks.Yet another example of how you might go beyond measuring sentiment alone, and applying valuable context to significant pieces of a story that you may have missed. The important thing to remember is, although these two examples show conversations involving celebrities and world events, brand and product related conversation are also highly prevalent. And that’s what we’ll look at next…

Obviously, success in social media is what you make it. Being conversational, approachable, and building relationships with your community takes time and effort. Small and medium sized businesses are doing this well. They understand that social media is the new word of mouth. Several are reducing customer service costs, and getting hyper-local reach. Sometimes the best companies are on our doorstep and we don’t even realize it.Enterprises are doing their share to embrace social media as well. Fortune 100 companies are starting to become more engaged in social media and have started to go beyond traditional networks to build communities on their own platforms.

But how are these companies leveraging social media monitoring to build their brands? Several applications come to mind:The most obvious one being brand/reputation management. You can’t join the conversation if you don’t know where it’s occurring. If you haven’t started listening or joining conversation yet, I would recommend you do so. This is the reason Marketwire started the social media fitness program earlier this year, to ensure companies started engaging their communities online. If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit sm10x30.com for more information.Agencies have embraced social media monitoring. Several have started offering social media monitoring reports and analysis to clients based on specific campaigns – a very smart idea. Several agencies have started measuring results directly, and are relating key performance indicators directly to return on investment for their social media efforts. Many have used social media monitoring solutions to run comparative reports showing how their services excel against their competition. These are significant, game-changing advantages.Small and medium-sized enterprises use social media monitoring to identify influencers and advocates in their industries and markets. Several companies are actively monitoring social media to resolve customer service issues and reduce support costs. Many are also leveraging competitive intelligence to gain insights on competitor activities.What are some specific examples of how companies are employing social media strategies, monitoring and analytics to build stronger relationships and drive ROI?

Everyone knows about Dell’s now infamous $3M in revenue through Twitter, but there are several other great examples that you may not have heard of… for example: Cisco found that providing user forums and participating in their online communities actually reduced customer support inquiries and tickets by 43%.Ebay finds that users that are engaged in their online communities in forums, on blogs, and on twitter are likely to spend an average of 54% more. (ARPO stands for average revenue per order). I’m guessing that had something to do with Ebay starting eBay Classifieds (or Kijiji in Canada). Build-A-Bear actually went one step further and created a platform, a destination for kids to interact with their brand and each other. Doing so boosted units sold to 60,000, generating half a million dollars in revenue. Shortly after the oil spill in the gulf, BP launched several reputation management strategies including an estimated $50M spent on television ads, $1M in paid search, and on the social media side: launched a website dedicated to the Gulf of Mexico Response, a YouTube channel, a FlickR pool, a Facebook page, and started Tweeting.Granted, some of these examples are somewhat older, but the reason for that is that companies have learned enough from their own social media engagement and analysis to realize that it’s starting to become a competitive advantage, so they’re less likely to publicize their successes.

Let’s talk about the SMART approach to social media engagement – making the most out of everything you do, and driving the most ROI for your brand or business. It’s a relatively simple concept, and works for pretty much any marketing strategy you want to test. By no means does it replace a formal social media strategy, but it does afford you a simple model that incorporates a self-sustaining positive feedback loop.The SMART approach involves five major steps. Socialize, monitor, analyze, report, and target. Let’s look at each one of these in greater detail.

Socialize, do what you do best. Perhaps the most important thing to remember in social media is to keep engaging in conversation. Why? Well, content may be king (for SEO that’s definitely the case), and context is queen (for analysis anyways), but conversation is your ace.You could be creating content like crazy, but it might just sit there, collecting dust. Socializing that content can give it legs, or even revive content that was way ahead of its time. That’s why social media engagement, monitoring, and analysis mesh so well with a strong content marketing strategy.Remember the example of Cisco that I quoted before. Cisco has a huge repository of information about their products and services, and yet the primary feedback channel that they relied on prior to social media was customer service technicians and call center agents. Social media engagement allowed them to reduce their customer service costs by 54%, in part by SOCIALIZING their content.

The second step in the process is monitoring.With monitoring, you can start to know the unknowns. Where are the channels your community gathers? Who are in those communities you’d like to engage? What is the sentiment behind what’s being said about you, is it good or bad? Does sentiment differ between cities, countries, ages, or the sexes?Think back to the Prism of Conversation and the daunting task of finding “where” conversations shape your brand. BP recognized the need to address their crisis by focusing on specific platforms, namely: Twitter, Facebook, and FlickR, but went one further and even started their own website to address a growing global concern. Monitoring helped them focus their efforts on “where” to engage.

Once you start monitoring, it will become increasingly important to analyze results. There is literally TOO MUCH information in social media monitoring and analytics tools, and it can become very difficult to understand that data and put it into context. If your goal is to determine ROI, you’ll need to understand the data that is bombarding you, and analyze it so that it makes sense and leads to actionable insight.You need to discover why topics are trending, or mentions show spikes. In many cases, you’ll need to streamline your efforts and target low hanging fruit. That means doing more for less, but also being smarter about the time and money you put behind social media efforts.My favorite line of this discussion is “lazy smart people automate!” and that’s exactly what everyone will have to do eventually. With all the data that’s available, and all the conversation that goes on in social media channels on a daily basis, you’ll need to automate the analysis of that data in order to process and understand it’s meaning.

You’re socializing, you’re monitoring, you’re analyzing conversation and even streamlining your efforts, now what? Reporting. Reporting is perhaps the most underestimated element of your social media strategy, but perhaps the most important. Without reporting, you can’t get into the habit of training your company into formulating and executing on all that wonderful analysis. Your goal is to provide actionable insights. A good framework to use would be to add statements to every report you send that states, “if we do X, we should expect Y”.Actionable insights… it’s a term we hear a lot. What does it mean, exactly? I don’t mean to ask the dictionary definition for the term, but what it means to YOUR business. For example. If I were Steve Jobs, and I just announced the new line of Macbook Air notebooks, I might ask which feature was discussed the most during my presentation. If I found that the majority of men aged 30-45 didn’t like the fact the new Macbook Air didn’t come with a 3D display, I might take that insight to my product management team for further investigation. Actionable insight!Another example. If I were an online electronics retailer with bricks and mortar locations across the country, and was interested to know which products were on most children’s holiday gift list this season and where they were located by state, I could use that information to adjust merchandise stock counts. Again, actionable insight!So now you know what actionable insight is, keep in mind that all the insight in the world doesn’t help management at your company decide the best route. My recommendation is to prioritize deliverables in one of several ways. Consider prioritizing actionable insights by time required to complete, budget, or potential impact on key performance indicators.Whatever you do, don’t keep actionable insights to yourself. Communicate those insights to the rest of your company, and increase your tribal knowledge. Step outside the confines of the Marketing and PR departments; share these insights with your Customer Service, Product Development and Management teams. A silo’d approach to social media is the wrong approach.

And the final step in the SMART approach is Target.This final step of the process is to strategically engage followers and members of your community for lead generation and online conversion: let’s be frank, you want to build better relationships with the stakeholders who are critical to the success of your organization and your brands. But that doesn’t mean brands can just go out and spam their audiences, it’s still very much about engagement and nurturing relationships, so the approach to leverage social media for sales is a bit different. Everyone says that engagement is your ROI for social media, but that’s not true. RETURN on that investment is your ROI; return, by definition is revenue. However, in social media, you need to resist the urge to pull out the old-school bullhorn, instead:One of the easiest things to do, and one of the first things to try is to cherry pick unsatisfied customers from competitors. Consumers are very vocal about bad experience, and are fickle, especially in social media. If they’re reaching out for help, extend a hand in their direction.Develop your community further, whether that’s on existing social media platforms, or going out on a limb to create your own destination. The key is to engage was many influencers as possible, and fine tune your messaging to drive conversions.Consider recruiting influencers in your community. Evangelists are key to assist your social media campaign and expand your reach, and affinity. Evangelists love your brand through good times and bad, and can actively support you in crisis situations – it’s true.

Now that we’ve taken a deep dive into challenges in social media monitoring and reviewed how you might find and apply actionable insights from social media data, I’m going to turn it over to Matt to review two unique solutions from Sysomos that enable you to make social media monitoring and analytics work for your brand.

Sysomos offers two core products, MAP and Heartbeat.Let’s talk through the differences between the two products first, to help explain their positioning, and then I’ll give you an overview of each product and its capabilities.

Search &amp; Filtering

Search &amp; Filtering

Search &amp; Filtering

Volume/Popularity and Text Analytics

Volume/Popularity and Text Analytics

Volume/Popularity and Text Analytics

Geo/Demo/Sentiment Analysis

Geo/Demo/Sentiment Analysis

Geo/Demo/Sentiment Analysis

Influencer identification

Influencer identification

Queries &amp; tags

Queries &amp; tags

Dashboard view

Dashboard view

Clip results &amp; alerts (filtering, sorting)

Clip results &amp; alerts (filtering, sorting)

Geo/Demo/Sentiment

Geo/Demo/Sentiment

Geo/Demo/Sentiment

Measure &amp; Compare

Measure &amp; Compare

Measure &amp; Compare

Facebook, Twitter and in-platform engagement

Facebook, Twitter and in-platform engagement

Thank you for attending our webinar today. To reach us at Marketwire, feel free to visit our website at www.marketwire.com, read our blog at marketwireblog.com, or

Transcript of "Making social media monitoring and analytics work for your brand"

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The 5W’s of business intelligence<br />What are people talking about?<br />When did these conversations happen?<br />Where did these conversations happen? <br />Who’s talking and what’s their influence?<br />Why are conversations happening?<br />